Shamelessly promoting myself

Life in Academia is a lot about promoting yourself. This autumn I have been busy writing applications for different scholarships. In these applications I tell people how original my research is, how many articles I have managed to get published in leading journals, how appreciated I am as a teacher and, finally, what a really nice guy I am.


- Gah! I feel fed up with it! So, I relax by taking a few minutes off, browsing the internet, just to find myself setting up a profile at Linkedin! And now, weblogging! I fear that even this is about conveying a certain image of my life.

At the bottom of this page (yes, I will activate "archiving" soon), you can read that I was a bit doubtful about starting a weblog without having a clearly defined purpose. But, as the number of posts has grown, I have come to more and more appreciate the concept. In a way, I am creating a personal archive of everyday reflections, much like writing a diary, only that I have to struggle to make my thoughts intelligible to the outside world. And that is good! When navigating the blogosphere, it seems like beneath all the commercial/pornographic dung, a new "republic of letters" is slowly manifesting itself. Add to that a good dose of citizen journalism and I think there is hope that the media landscape of the future may hold a lot more than Metro...